


there's a train leaving nightly

by prufrock



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-14 03:42:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20594117
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrock/pseuds/prufrock
Summary: "Russian folk culture depicts the soul either as small and childlike, or having wings and flying. For forty days after a funeral, the soul of the deceased visits places it liked or places where it sinned to ask for forgiveness. After forty days the deceased’s family sets a place for their loved one at dinner, inviting him or her join them for his or her own commemoration."For forty days, Nat wanders.





	there's a train leaving nightly

1.

42°02'22.7"N 73°55'19.3"W

THE HUDSON

She wakes standing in a river. That’s the first thing.

She’s ankle deep, just a step or two from the water’s edge, and the water isn’t warm or cold so much as it just _ is _, a thick quiet presence around her legs. She’s barefoot, which is the second thing she notices, and it’s annoying. She can’t remember where her boots went. In fact, she realizes, she can’t remember how she got here. 

She steps back out of the water, dragging her feet in the grass to wipe off the mud and silt, and looks out across the water. She feels odd—not sick, not bad, just light, the feeling of waking up too early after a night spent on an empty stomach. Her hair is wrong too: it’s falling into her eyes, overgrown bangs and a tight ponytail pulling at the back of her skull. 

The river, though, is familiar. Natasha can even give it a name: the Hudson. It’s the river by the compound, the one Tony always talked about taking a boat out on, as though he’s the kind of guy who takes boats out anywhere. She sat here with Steve a few weeks back, after a long day of putting out fires in this shard of a world and the hundred next door, balancing a bottle of Jameson on the uneven ground while Steve smoked through a pack of cigarettes and they argued about constellations. 

_ City kid, _ she called him. He laughed at that. 

For a second, she sees stars blooming in the blue overhead, but nightfall lifts fast as something splashes explosively farther down the bank and somebody starts to shout. She knows that voice—that roar, that’s Bruce, and that’s Thor, trying to placate him, always the desperate peacemaker, and that’s—

_ You’re a pain in my ass, you know that? _

She stumbles on the damp grass, tasting mountain air, smelling blood. She can hear them arguing on the dock, can hear someone crying, and her chest is light and full like a parachute. Her hair’s too short, too tight, too long, blinding her; she hasn’t worn it like this since she was a child, since before all of this. 

_ Tell my—do we know if she had—family? _

Birds are crying overhead, birds she’s never heard in this country, _ ч _ _ ёрный гриф _. They’re in the trees, but she can’t see them. 

_ Please. _

She fell. She fell, and she landed here. And _ here _ is moving without her. She can still hear the voices across the water, but there’s no heartbeat in her chest, a strange silence she can’t ignore now that she’s noticed. She opens her mouth and cranks her ribcage open, and can’t feel breath stirring in her throat. She’s drowning on dry land. 

She feels fine. She feels empty and light, a paper lantern bobbing along the edge of the water as Bruce shouts and Clint ducks his head to the rough wooden railing and Steve cries, choking on tears and snot and hot breath that she can see even from her distance. 

_ So I won. So this is what it feels like. _ She wants, instantly and stupidly, to tell Clint. 

She makes her way down the river, first along grass and flattened reeds and then through the water, fascinated by the weird dry warmth around her ankles as she heads towards the dock. When she gets there, Tony’s already walking off up the path to the compound; Nat watches his back and remembers when her job was to be the GPS tracker to his emotional avoidance, following his manic signal all around the state of California till Nick decided to hire him for a job he was in no way qualified to do. _ Against _ her explicit recommendation. Nat’s glad, after all this time, that he ignored her report. 

Bruce lumbers up the path behind Tony, carrying his weight better than Nat ever imagined he could. He’ll do okay, Nat thinks. Thor is leaning on a post, his sunglasses down, his arms bundled into each other in a helpless gesture of resignation; he’s checked out again. Steve’s wiping his eyes, sheepish and red and radiant with righteous anger, and looking at him Nat feels that sweet old affection ache through her. He’s such an idiot. She’s proud of him. 

She waits for a minute, taking it in. All the time in the world, now, to think about this little family she stumbled into just in time to lose it. She watches Steve scrub his hands through his hair and stare helplessly through her, and she follows his gaze, revolving on the spot, finally, to the right. 

Looking at Clint feels like a hole punched in the film between her new world and his, like a fresh torrent of pure oxygen channeled directly into her inert heart. She remembers, wildly, lying under a downed Jeep outside Kurdamir, feeling her lung collapse with every panicked breath. Every particle of him is out of her reach, every vowel and hum of his voice is printed on the inside of her brain, echoing so loudly she has to close her eyes. 

She opens them again, and steels herself to look. He’s staring out across the river, not crying, not blinking, and she knows him so well, the way he translates grief into obstinance, that defensive hunch of his shoulders she can read without thinking. Standing a foot away from him, she can feel his heartbeat. 

He’s angry at her. She knows it won’t last, she knows exactly why, and knows in his place she’d be furious at him, but it hurts all the same, and there’s nothing she can do, no way to ground herself against the wave of pain that knowledge sends over her weightless body.

“I’m sorry,” she says. Her first words in the afterlife are swallowed; it’s strange to hear her own voice, not in her head, but echoing outside of her like a recording played into an empty room. It’s not enough. 

“We’ve got work to do.”

Clint turns, and Nat’s turning to follow him, but the warped wood under her feet goes soft, crumbling like an old sponge, black rot spilled out into the dark water below, and she’s falling, farther than the river is deep, as Clint’s face warps and shrinks and vanishes into the impossible distance above her. 

The next time she finds herself awake, the world breaks apart and Tony dies. 

2\. 

23°53'13.6"S 46°40'11.5"W

OUTSIDE SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

The sky falls; the universe cracks open; the dust settles. Nat feels it all from just out of sight, watching without seeing as Steve lifts himself out of the mud time after time, stubborn to the end; as light spills into their world and pours out souls along with it; as Tony jumps on the grenade and burns alive and whatever tenuous cosmic bandwidth Nat’s currently occupying crackles furiously in response. 

She stands on the bank of the lake, the morning after, and looks for him in the crowd. Everyone’s here, even Nick, even Hank Pym and Secretary Ross—Tony would get a real kick out of _ that _, she thinks—and she knows Tony well enough to know he’d never miss the chance to attend his own funeral. If he’s here, she figures, he’s on his own channel. 

She doesn’t stay long. Life’s starting to move on, and everything starts fading to gray static: Pepper and Morgan walking up to the house; Clint and Wanda by the water with their arms around each other; Steve and Sam talking by their car in voices she can’t hear, a conversation encrypted into nonsense syllables. The scene dissolves; she can feel hot sunlight sparkling through her hair, radiating off vast sheets of concrete and glass. 

It doesn’t take long to recognize the place. _ Centro de Lançamento _; the Parelheiros-Itanhaém Highway 57; São Paulo. She’s standing in the scrubby grass off the shoulder of the highway, a few paces from the vast parking lot that surrounds the facility, which looms over the rows of stack-parked SUVs like an ugly crystalline fungus. 

She knows why she’s here. She remembers the briefing, the tape dropped in a garbage can on the far edge of the park in Gomel; she listened on her Walkman and memorized it so that even here, now, she can hear each word clearly, start to finish. She remembers taking the winding roads down from Guarulhos through the subprefecture, skyscrapers giving way to sprawling favelas along the way. She remembers walking through the front doors of the facility, the crisp pressure of aggressive air conditioning climbing her back as she walked into reception. She hears the sequence in her mind: _ 2-6-6, 7-3-0, 3-4-0, 2-3-5, 5-5-7, 2-8-1, 3-3-9, 9-9-0, 5-1-4. _

She walks across the grass now, sensing the heat rising up at her as she crosses onto pavement; it’s spring in São Paulo. She skirts the edge of the parking lot and climbs the verge past the facility and into the forest behind, walking through shadow and shifting air. There’s no path. There was no path twenty years ago, when she parked her bike here against the spread roots of a walking palm. She finds herself watching the ground for tire tracks, but every trace of her has been erased from this place. It was gone the day they airlifted her out in 2003. 

The forest thins as she moves down the long slope towards Vargem Grande. The village lies in the shallow basin of a crater; she knows this from the briefing, from the stories she heard over and over twenty years ago. She knows that the crater stretches across approximately 3.6 kilometers and drains to the east towards the Billings Reservoir. She knows that Vargem Grande, spread out across the northern stretch of the basin between the research facility and the launching site, had a population close to 40,000 people in the year 2000. Minus one thousand, she thinks, that’s 39,000 people living in the houses stacked against the low hills in the distance. 

As she walks, she starts seeing streaks of black amid the greenery, snapped trunks among the new leaves all around. She didn’t know how high the fire climbed. 

She turns left, circling the rim of the crater, noting each skeletal tree, every patch of bare, blackened earth. It’s a long hike, but her legs don’t tire as the sun inches westward across the sky above her, and even though the shade still isn’t back to full growth, she’s not sweating when she reaches the edge of Vargem Grande. 

She walks through the streets slowly, not sure what she’s looking for. She watches a crowd of chickens scratching the dust, hears a game of football tearing up the lot behind a brick wall propped up by beams, watches sisters doing laundry in the dying sunshine. As she moves through the village, she starts to feel them: strange pricks of electricity deep in her chest, between her shoulders, tugging her back and forth so she feels off-balance. There’s no rhythm to them. She keeps walking, pain building in her spine and climbing up her throat. 

She never came here, back in 2003. She read the headlines, of course, back in Yasenevo—_ Rocket Explodes on Pad, Starts Fire; Brazilian Rocket Accident Kills Hundreds; Spaceport Tragedy Sets Rainforest Ablaze; AEB Experts Allege Sabotage in Deadly Rocket Incident _—but she was in the air before the codes she punched into Carlos Laureano’s computer tripped the reaction, before the spark on the launchpad set 118 feet of solid rocket fuel alight, before twenty technicians became ash and teeth so mangled that dental records couldn’t name them, before the flames climbed the dry forest to the village perched on the edge of the Colônia crater. 

_ Socorro _, the air whispers. She passes a burnt-out house, and three sharp flashes of pain bloom in her chest. 

In the central square, she finds the church. It burned in 2003; she can tell because the cinder block walls stand out brighter than the earth around them, like newly healed tissue. She stands in the doorway, unsure of herself. There are people inside, but they’re hard to see, kneeling patches of doubled shadow whispering prayers in a language she only partly understands. She never spent much time in churches while she was alive. It seems strange to start now. 

She walks to the other side of the village as the sun sets around her, lighting the rooftops on fire. As she passes the last house on the outskirts of town, one last spark ignites in her chest and catches, swelling to a blinding fire that sweeps through her body, disintegrating her hair, eating the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet, melting into a cloud of ash that drifts off on the evening breeze. 

The fire burns itself out, and she walks back into the skeletal forest, every footstep weightless on the charred earth. 

3.

33°57'35.6"N 118°21'06.0"W

INGLEWOOD, CA

First, it’s the burnt-out favela and the dead forest. Then, an apartment in Sofia, staring through layers of paint at Tatiana Markov’s blood on the wall over the bed. She fades out of Bulgaria and wakes up in a hospital in Mombasa, where she walks the halls and can’t get the smell of smoke out of her lungs. 

There are good memories, too—a stream in the mountains that she doesn’t recognize where her chest swells with peace; the hotel room she and Clint shared in Hungary; that donut place near Battery Park. Once, she spends an afternoon in Sam’s backyard in Arlington, watching him grill chicken and Steve play with Hambone. But the smoke starts to blow too thickly over the grass, blinding her, swallowing up the porch light and the barking dog and Steve’s awkward shoulders, and when it clears again she’s standing on the steps of the Church of St. George in Smederevo with gunpowder reeking on the air as the bells thunder a thousand feet above. 

She keeps walking. She visits the Red Room, more than once. She jumps on a freight car bound for Novosibirsk and sits out the journey with a trio of corpses, cut throats leering at her through the black. Three weeks after she dies, Natasha kneels on the flowered tundra of the Gydansky Peninsula and whispers the names of the twenty-seven girls she left here so many years ago that she died double their age. As she says each name, something in her seeps away, leaching into the frozen ground, painted on the air like hot breath. 

She closes her eyes in Russia, and opens them in Inglewood. It takes her a moment to orient herself, but she recognizes the low red roofs and stubby palms, the pet store across the street and the Wells Fargo down the block; she’s on East Hillcrest, facing north towards the cemetery. She follows old instinct down to the corner, takes a left onto Nutwood and another onto Market, passing the one-hour photo place that’s been closed for years and sidestepping the woman in the flowing gray top outside the Church of Scientology. She crosses the street, not waiting for cars, and steps inside the cafe. 

It’s not much to look at: a long narrow room, glass-walled counter on one side and bare brown tables lined up against the other, and yards of bland linoleum and tile that haven’t been bleached since 1997. She sits down at an empty table underneath a painting of what she thinks is meant to be a duck pond, puts her feet up on the checkered seat cushion, and breathes in the smell of burnt coffee, $1.75 a cup. She’s glad they haven’t updated the place. 

_ I don’t know how you take it _ , Clint says. Nat can feel the burn on her tongue, in the back of her throat where the coffee scalded as she drank it. They came here in February, in a rain so thick and cold it slid under her jacket and soaked her shirt, snaking up her wrists and into her socks so that inside the cafe she felt herself steaming, a short pale dumpling with a bad haircut and borrowed boots. _ I guess that answers that _, Clint said when she downed the cup of coffee he ordered her, and in the present she hears his laugh bounce off the big empty mirrors lining the room. 

A sunbeam inches past her ear; Nat can see shadows moving on the walls, people watching her from the mirrors who aren’t here. Someone at the counter orders a BLT, and Nat tastes white toast and salt. _ Agent Romanoff _ , she hears Nick saying, _ you’ve got a very interesting resume _. He’d watched her when he said it, as though it was a question with an answer. She can picture him now, leaning back slightly in the chair across from her, his chicken club untouched. She’d shrugged, and before the meal was over she’d gotten her first orders from S.H.I.E.L.D. 

He’d been taking a chance, she knows. She’s always known. She knows he had her under surveillance for the first year, too. She can still feel the dull pain that dropped into her gut when she saw him at the morgue, the slow, gnawing sorrow that rose in her belly over what already seems the distant past five years, as day after week after month went by with no word from Fury. 

She’s getting tired. At every new visit, she’s felt something drain out of her; there’s not much left. The sunlight on the tabletop shows up a constellation of half-thumbprints and smudges. At some point, she thinks, she probably left her prints on one of these tables. She wonders how many more places have some piece of her DNA, some trace of her that’ll last longer than whatever fragile wavelength she’s wandering. She guesses it isn’t many. She guesses she could count them on one hand. 

As she watches the dust floating over the glass partitions, she feels a weight in her jacket pocket she didn’t notice before. She reaches in. She’s got seven quarters exactly, and she leaves them on the table when the sun sets and walks off towards Hillcrest Boulevard as the street lights blink on behind her. 

4.

39°15'N 91°31'06.2"W

OUTSIDE VANDALIA, MO

Light is the first thing. Smoke is the second. Before she even sees the room, she feels it: close crowded walls, shifting curtains sending bright air in all directions, heavy box springs beneath her pushing up, a stubborn cloud of steel suspending her soul between ceiling and floor. And she smells smoke, but for the first time it’s distant, not choking; something faraway, nothing to do with her. 

This time, it’s harder to wake up. Her eyes are too heavy, or maybe too light, and when she opens them it takes time for the colors to develop. She’s lying on a pieced quilt, soft with use, in a tiny bedroom on an upper floor, and she can smell smoke from beyond the bubbled window. Leaf smoke, she thinks. It’s November. 

She’s surprised it’s taken her this long to get here. She’s in the upstairs guest bedroom at the farm; that’s Cooper’s painting of a frog on the wall over the dresser, and the quilt was Laura’s mother’s, and from somewhere that sounds much too far below her she can hear Lila and Nate arguing over whose turn it is on the swing. She can’t hear Clint, yet, but she knows he’s here, somewhere, knows like it’s her own heartbeat she’s following out of the bedroom and down the old carpeted stairs. 

Clint’s bent over the kitchen sink, sleeves rolled to the elbows, wrestling with a naked turkey and yelling into the next room _ Did we really need _ eighteen _ pounds, babe? _ Nat witnesses his tribulations for a while, and she can’t help laughing at his furious concentration as he grapples with the dumb thing’s bare legs. Forty days ago, she died, and now she’s haunting Clint Barton’s kitchen, watching him struggle to get a dead bird bigger than a Chihuahua tied up with kitchen twine. Nat can’t wrap her head around this afterlife thing.

Clint finally gives up on his twine operation and heaves the whole turkey into a cast iron pan. 

“Good job,” she tells him. 

For a second, Clint looks up, and she thinks he’s heard her—he’s squinting almost in her direction—but he’s just looking at the clock on the stove behind her, checking the time; he can’t hear her. She’s imagining things. For a long minute, she chokes on disappointment, and then time shifts. 

She’s watching the kitchen darken and swell around her. Clint chases a cat she doesn’t recognize out of the room; Lila walks in, asking for water; the oven burns and seethes and crackles in the corner. Outside the window, she sees a bird fly by, too big for Missouri, too dark and crooked. Things are moving too fast, and she can’t catch hold of anything. The kids’ faces start to blur, until she’s not sure who she’s looking at, not sure she could recognize them in a crowd, and she’s weightless, spinning, spinning, nothing tethering her here anymore, not even Clint’s voice, not the million sins she shed into the universe, not the home this never was, and always was, even if she never told Clint so when she had the chance.

“I love you,” she says to Clint’s shadow, as it shoulders past her towards the shimmering dining room. “I love you.” He keeps walking, dissolving into light beyond the doorway. 

As if she needed to say it.

She waits to wake up again, and she doesn’t. 

She’s falling again. 

And then, as she always suspected—nothing. 


End file.
